Women earn €25,000 less than men in financial sector

Women in the financial sector earn an average of €25,000 less than men, data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) shows.

A review of the financial sector in 2018 shows that the 54,000 women employed earned an average of €49,000 compared to an average of €74,000 for the 53,000 men employed in the sector in the Republic.

More than one-third of all employees in the sector worked for either retail banks or the Central Bank in 2018, with a fifth working at insurance companies. But it was "other financial corporations" where workers commanded the highest salaries, with annual earnings in that subsector totalling €65,600. For the Central Bank and retail banks, average earnings were €60,000 while at insurance companies, they stood at €54,300.

In every subsector, men earned more than women, with the biggest gap being in the “other financial corporations” subsector where the average earnings for a woman was 62.3 per cent of that for a man. Insurance companies had the smallest difference (€19,000) with a woman’s salary being 70.8 per cent of the average of that for a man.

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Lower half

Women were concentrated mainly in the lower half of the earnings distribution. For annual earnings of €60,000 upwards, more men than women were found in every bracket. Of the 11,800 people earning €100,000 or more in 2018, 74.2 per cent were men.

The CSO’s data also looks at the sector more broadly and found that, in 2018, it contributed €21.7 billion to the Irish economy. The sector had total assets of €5.2 trillion, of which 44 per cent was in investment funds with 11 per cent in retail banks.

Banknotes became a far less common feature in the State between 2009 and 2018, the data also shows. There were 41 per cent fewer notes issued in 2018, when the total reached 242 million notes, than in 2009. The number of issued coins was more volatile, showing a less consistent downward trend. The CSO suggested that the fall in demand was linked to the development of electronic payments, better technology and digitisation.